Notices by Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club), page 4

So they don't have to test the card individually, just all the sigils.

This also enables the game to modify cards mid-game: with special events you can copy the sigils from one card to another, making new combinations of sigils.

So you're effectively rewriting the rules written on a card as part of gameplay.

A very neat mechanic and you can see how the sigils-instead-of-rules made it possible

Sorry I'm having to make really short posts because my mastodon client tends to crash and lose half-finished posts every time I tab over to Firefox

I've been wondering about this sort of thing ever since Sid Meier's Colonization. It's not a deck builder (it's a 4x a la Civilization) but it has a "founding fathers" mechanic where you periodically recruit historic figures, and they have similar game-rules-changing effects

Paul Revere makes it so that if a city is attacked when it had no army but it has muskets in the storehouse, it'll temporarily promote a non-soldier unit to soldier and have them defend

Like if you recruit Hernando de Soto, the goody huts on the map only return positive results, and every unit's scouting radius increases

That sort of thing.
These sorts of "every option involves changing the game rules" things are always fascinating to me, both as a gamer and a game developer.

Do you ever get the urge to program a deckbuilding game?

Because it'd be such an interesting challenge to architect! A good deckbuilding game is full of cards/item/units that essentially alter the rules for that one card, and that's gonna be very interesting to implement.

Like you have
* the Rat: 1 damage 1 health
* the Wolf: 3 damage 2 health
* the Armadillo: only takes damage on even numbered turns
* the Oxpecker: the card to the left has +2 health

Of course you could always just pull a Nethack and make every line of code endless ternary conditions like the very idea of OO is an insult to K&R themselves.

damage=weapon_damage*strength+(lane>0 && playfield[lane-1]==CARD_OXPECKER)?2:0)

How do you implement that without this becoming a nightmare of endless difficult-to-test specialized code?

That's the challenge

Hey you know how computers sometimes have multiple USB (A) ports at different orientations and it's the worst thing?

Bad idea: a PC with dual floppy drives, but one is mounted upside down

argh. I continue to be stuck in the annoying position of not doing enough JS to really get into the ecosystem, but having to more than no JS, thus I need to interact with the JS ecosystem

I HAVE AN HTML FILE AND A .JS FILE AND THEY ARE FRIENDS

my package manager is... I don't need one? until I wanted to use this one library, apparently

someone writes some code that does exactly what I want, and the install instructions are "just use yarn add or npm -i!" and I'm using neither of those things

I don't want to convert my entire project to EMCAScript Modules and build it with a Bundler. It doesn't work that way and really doesn't need to work there way.

Sometimes the problem with being an occasional-writer is that you'll have an idea like "hell stores faustian contracts on the blockchain" and you just have to write it, no matter if you think it'll be any good or not.

I've got the electronics repair version of the second-hand embarrassment some people get watching sitcoms.

The repair guy on YouTube just went, in voice over, "now watch very carefully: I'm about to learn something that'll stay with me forever" and they're probing around a power supply, bare hands visible, right next to the AC section, and the whole thing is live and powered.

I had to pause and type this up because I do not want to see this fool zap themselves

Bad scifi typo: "protein torpedo"

Terrible idea: a scifi story set in a early-20th century idea of the solar system.

Mars is a dying desert covered in canals to bring water from the poles to the sand cities at the equator.
Venus is a humid jungle/swamp full of strange beasts.
Both are fully habitable by humans with no more gear than you'd need to cross the Sahara or venture into the rainforest.

The trick? This is actually a distant future realistic setting. We terraformed the planets specifically to be like that.